it more abundantly" (John 10:10). This desire is innate in us because of our generic relation to the Spirit of Life, and therefore, so far from being condemned by Scripture, its fulfilment is placed before us as the one object of attainment, and the professed purpose of the Bible is to lead us to seek it in the right way instead of in the wrong one. To seek it in the right way is Righteousness or Rightness. To seek it in the wrong way is the Inversion of Rightness and is what is meant by Sin.

Those grosser forms of sin which we all recognise as such are only the one original transgression --- of seeking from without what can only come by growth from within --- when assuming its crudest aspect, but the underlying principle is the same; and so the allegory of the Fall is typical of all sin, of that inverted conception of life which, because it is inverted, must necessarily lead us away from the Spiritual Source of Life instead of towards it. The story is, so to say, a sort of algebraic generalisation of the factors concerned.

When this becomes clear to us, we begin to see the necessity for the removal of sin. We see that hitherto we have been trying to live by an inverted conception of the principle of Life, whether this wrong conception has shown itself in crude and gross forms or more subtly in the purely intellectual region.

Reconciliation

In either case the result is the same --- the consciousness